High Speed Dirt, Keep Your Hands To Yourself

Wrapping up the Hawks soiree with the Ducks and some existential, I guess, Bears thoughts.

Sector 1901 - High Speed Dirt

Playing a team such as the Ducks when they are on the second of a back-to-back, with the first half in Dallas, the expectation really should be getting a win. Maybe even an easy win. Yet the Hawks failed that test last night, and not only did they fail it but they capitulated a little too easy. And that's even for a team as go-nowhere as this current iteration.

If the Hawks were supposed to be more "competitive" this season, that would mean winning games against their fellow halibut and flounder. And yet they've managed to lose to the Ducks and Predators at home, with both losses seeing them surrender leads. They've lost to the Sharks on the road. They weren't all that close to Detroit.

One worries for Luke Richardson, and the guillotine may be coming down soon. It's apparent Kyle doesn't have too many other ideas.

Anyway, we should get to the bullets, such as they are.

The Hawks just can't play at any speed higher than second gear. The Ducks can't really either, but they can come closer than the Hawks can. After the Hawks took a 2-1 lead, the Ducks really upped their forechecking, sometimes with all three forwards just going hellbent for leather. It turned the game into a pretty messy, disjointed slop, but one the Hawks couldn't wrangle back in.

Without Seth Jones, the Hawks don't have enough d-men who can make plays quickly enough to bypass that kind of forecheck. Vlasic can, Kaiser has his moments, and that's about it. They can just basically scramble the puck out of the zone like a tired swimmer reaching for the edge of the pool. The passes don't connect, they can't get any flow going toward the Ducks zone, and they mostly just hack dump-ins and change. When they could even escape their own zone, that is.

That can look like a lack of energy or verve to idiots like Caley Chelios, but there is a structural cause to it. The Ducks aren't very fluid either, but they can at least skate at that speed. When facing a team as unskilled as the Hawks, it's fine for the Ducks to turn the thing into a frantic, scramble-y free-for-all. They're just going to find more loose pucks and open spaces in the mess because they have more speed in the lineup.

The Ducks are a terrible defensive team and the Hawks barely made them work for the last 30 minutes. Let's use some visual evidence instead of my blathering.

Here's where the Ducks have given up shots all season:

And here's where the Hawks got to last night:

And here's how you should feel about it:

As for the grand experiment of Connor Bedard on the wing, it was... fine. Bedard took advantage of the Ducks getting a little puck-watchy when he was on it, which is a good sign. He hadn't been doing enough of that lately, and Jason Dickinson is dependable enough to not only be a good forechecker to give Bedard those opportunities but to then get to the right spaces.

And yet, Bedard still only had one shot. He didn't get anything off the rush, he's not getting down lower than the circles with the puck very often, so how do he and the Hawks expect him to generate much? If he's the playmaker on a line, which he is with Dickinson and a stiff-du-jour, then he's not going to get down low, at least not to shoot. That doesn't mean anyone should want him trying to play Tyler Bertuzzi's or Nick Foligno's game (we'd settle for Tyler Bertuzzi playing Tyler Bertuzzi's game once a a week at this point). But there's got to be more than this.

Alec Martinez will take his share of the blame for the winning goal, but Nolan Allan did him no favors. Allan got outside the dots to try and stop Killorn coming over the line, which forces Martinez to come too far over and leave Carlsson a route to the net. If Allan is going to be out there then just go for broke and don't let Killorn get to his forehand.

Phil Kurashev with a cool 7.5 xG% last night. His line as a whole with Foligno and Teravainen had a 6.8 xG%. Blender really pumping out some winners. They weren't even matched up against either of the Ducks top two lines.

For a team that can't score, keeping Frank Nazar and his 15 points in 12 games in Rockford is a choice.

That's ok though, according to Caley Chelios, every shift that doesn't end with two goals against is a great one. At least CHSN is consistent that anyone in the booth has to piss in our ear.

In Mintyukov, LaCombe, and Zellweger the Ducks have a lot of get-up-and-go from their defense. All three were more than happy to carry the mail themselves through the neutral zone. Probably something to be learned from that.

Ok, that's enough. None of us want to admit we thought about a Ducks-Hawks game that much anyway.

Sons Of Lemuel - Keep Your Hands To Yourself

It's depressing when it gets dark at 4:30 for everyone. Why do you think the British are the way the are? It's especially more so when we Bears fans realize that everything we see from here until the first week of January is basically meaningless. I really don't think there's much better than those late-season 3pm starts for a big game. They briefly start in the setting sun and moves into the night. Even last Sunday, as the game ticked down, there's something about that sliver of light that makes it feel a bit more epic. Even a bit more epic in collapse, such as it worked out.

I read this yesterday from Da Bears Blog, and they're pretty clued in over there. Not too much of it is surprising, but it does work as a nice reset. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but I'll gank some points from it.

"George is one of the most hands-off owners in the league. "

To me, for the most part, this is actually a good thing. We already know in this town what it's like when an owner gets too involved, or at least has some decrees that aren't breakable. Look at the Sox, Bulls, and Cubs for that. Remember, the Cubs' somewhat recent triumph was when Tom Ricketts hired the best exec available (and he wasn't even THAT available at the time) and let him do his job basically unencumbered. The problems didn't start until ol' Tommy Boy started telling Theo what he couldn't do.

The fact that George McCaskey lets the people below him do their jobs is really how an organization should work. There's a chain of command that most successful places would have in place. Again, we've seen the reverse in town when John McDonough decided he could do some of the GM job. That ended with Brent Seabrook signed for 25 years, Bryan Bickell's contract and trade that cost the Hawks prime Teuvo, and a host of other deals. I wouldn't want this for the Bears. And if you do, check out how it's going for the Cowboys or Jets lately.

But there is a such thing as too hands-off. McCaskey is so hands-off that when it has come time to hire a new GM, he's helpless. He's out of the loop, and that's how we get Ernie Accorsi and the deflated football on his head or Bill Polian emerging from whatever wooded area he lives in to pick some jamoke to run the Bears.

I would describe myself as probably a casual NFL fan. Those of you who are that or more, if we all could have spent our entire lives around a NFL team with nothing else to do, go to all the owners' meetings and various league functions, could probably, after 10,20,30 years or whatever, know how to and who to interview and hire as a GM. Maybe all the owners shun George when he offers them his room temperature chocolate milk, but I also think most of us could clear that bar, too.

That said, despite it more likely having to do with his choice of agent. George at least looked at the current model team, Kansas City, and decided to pick someone out of a front office that does keep producing players and championship-level teams. Now, maybe Ryan Poles was the stooge in the KC front office that they were more than happy to usher elsewhere. It's starting to feel a bit like that. But generally, looking at the team that's doing it better than everyone and getting some of that for yourself is a sound process.

"Is Kevin Warren the worst hire of George’s tenure? No, not in a world where the football leadership was once Phil Emery and Marc Trestman. But Warren is pretty close."

You don't say? Honestly, at this point I just laugh at the stadium fiasco and feel relief that Warren hasn't (yet) felt the need to get his incompetent paws into the football side.

Hughes ends this article with a few paragraphs on Poles. The key point is that at the beginning of this season, everyone, and we do mean everyone and not just us cloudy-eyed fans, thought this roster was good enough to win 9-10 games if not more. And that wasn't due to any faith in the head coach at all. Poles has had his monumental fuck-ups to be sure. The leading one being not firing Eberflus last January, and the second one probably not firing him a couple weeks ago. There are obvious holes in this roster.

But those holes would look different, and smaller, with even just competent coaching and a couple more wins. Which their balloon-handed coach has single-handedly cost them. Any rational coaching gets the Bears wins in DC and against the Packers. What's the feeling about the Bears if they were simply 6-4 and coming off a last-second win against Green Bay?

It sucks, and I mean it really sucks, that we have to do this dance again. Where there's a part of us that has to hope the Bears don't look all that good to close out the season so that Eberflus somehow ducks the axe again. And we'll get all excited about the next coach being one of the final pieces. And I'll forget my rule about anyone hired by the McCaskeys or hired by someone hired by the McCaskeys is an idiot until proven otherwise. Because I'm a fan, I desperately want the Bears to be good, and a Super Bowl win is really the last space on my fandom bingo card I haven't checked.

After reading Hughes's article, I guess I feel a touch better. In that so much hinges on the next offseason. But I'm tired of things hinging on the offseason. I want things to hinge on what goes on between the lines after the sun has set in the 2nd quarter and the air turns crisper. It's hard to see how we'll ever get there right now.